Hurricane Sandy forces New York to shut down

The city that never sleeps has been forced to stop as a result of Storm Sandy, shutting down one of the world’s major financial centres for some time to come.

Manhattan, which was struck by the severe flooding and hurricane-force winds brought by a storm has now experienced a power outage leaving an estimated five million people without electricity.

It is predicted that this could take around 10 days to be restored, leaving the state in darkness and a financial mess with predictions that it is costing companies around $5 million a minute.

News feeds have stopped hitting European news sites, while a range of technology companies were forced to delay product launches.

Google was forced to pull out of an event where it was to show off its new Nexus devices, while AMD was also made to cancel a range of announcements.

And data centres also seem to be hit by the storm.

Yesterday Intermap emailed its customers advising them that its facility in New York was experiencing “significant flooding in the sub basement”.

It said the flooding had submerged and destroyed the site’s diesel pumps, preventing fuel from being pumped to the generators on the mezzanine level.

It said the available fuel reserves on the mezzanine level were estimated to support customer loads for approximately five to seven hours and once this fuel supply had been used the generator would no longer be able to sustain operation, meaning critical customer power loads would be lost.

Rackspace and Amazon web services however, said they had procedures in place to ensure they had enough power to withstand the worst of the storm. Rackspace yesterday said it had 60 hours worth of power, while Amazon this morning reported it was business as usual.